by Peter Nadas
They were hard years, to be sure, who had it easy. Thus did the pastor go around the problematical subject. Frankly, we shall all make our accounting before the just Lord.
How many things one has to live through during one’s service, replied Balter, equally indulgent. One could go on talking about it until tomorrow morning, but he fell silent quickly, as if he had given himself away with his own unguarded words.
He had much to be silent about. Before he left his job, he had had to reconfirm both his verbal and written oaths to keep his silence.
People say you are alone, is your dear wife no longer alive, if I may ask frankly, said the pastor deliberately but cautiously, as if at the moment when the other opened up he wanted to reach even further into the darkness. But in fact he was thinking about his own fate.
If you only knew how much my old lady is still alive and living her own life, if I may put it that way, Balter replied. It’s not the kind of life you’d understand, he said, and his voice reverberated with a hatred for educated people that he’d accumulated over many decades and which felt at this moment just like the hatred he felt for his wife and son.
Though my wife wasn’t a regular whore, no worry about that.
It was probably his surprise at opening up like this that made his reply come out so coarsely.
I must say, though, to be frank with you, she wasn’t much better. So why shouldn’t she live her own life, he added with an unpleasantly grating laugh. I couldn’t care less.
That is how, at that moment, the ignominy of the two men’s fate became entwined.
They glanced at each other in their mutual shame, as if they had no way to avoid this common ignominy. They could not have been more different; nothing bound them together but their age; and they saw nothing in each other’s eyes but that they were both men.
The first word was lacking.
In the pastor, the lack of a daily dose of good had become so acute that he could make no room for more evil. He asked no more questions, didn’t want to turn more of the man’s evil on himself. When he heard Balter’s indecent laugh, apathy settled into his heart, the most dangerous kind of apathy.
Balter suspected rigid rejection and hard moral judgment behind the spectacles. What more could he expect from such a powerful man. His superiority shrank, now consisting only of the fact that his wife was indeed alive. He could have done nothing with the other man except, in anger about his own fate, knock him out.
Yet the other man’s mute sorrow pierced his self-esteem as a pin would a balloon.
He almost cried out in the evening silence.
My wife waited for me, sir, ambushed me with a sack, and my only son beat me until I was bloody. If you want to know how they did it, I’ll be happy to tell you. With the poker. They broke four of my ribs, he cried, and seeing the effect of his words on the pastor’s face, he added something that sounded truly strange.
If I don’t get killed, I’ll have to kill my potential killer.
The water carried his voice on its whirling surface, and from the reddish shore of Vác an echo returned it.
It could not be determined whether he was referring to his wife or his son. They went on trying to gauge in each other’s eyes what might happen next.
Not for anything in the world would he tell the pastor more serious things about his son, though he had much to tell.
The water was lapping the sand gently in front of them, and if the two men did not go at each other it was because of the heart-numbing apathy that had somewhat tamed the pastor’s murderous impulse. Bats flew over their heads and the screeching of nocturnal birds was heard from among the willows. When the pastor finally spoke again, only the Creator might have known what nonsense he was going to come up with.
It’s been four full years since my poor dear wife, my sweet little Emmi, my one and only died. This was his dulled, pained response, and he almost broke down in the middle of it; while he struggled for words and for air with his trembling lips, he had the feeling that with every word he should bow to the ground.
He wanted to throw light on the other man’s fate with his own.
The disgrace of the uttered words instantly disgraced his dead.
His dull cry of pain had no echo.
Even after so many decades, he could not predict what a man locked hermetically in his will and physical strength might do with his feelings. Neither of them failed to notice that in the interval of their struggle with these blind emotions, the searchlights on the prison watchtowers had been turned on. The beams bore through the twilight; the harsh light spread and stretched out over the water.
Reflected light fell on Balter’s eyes and on the pastor’s glasses.
My dear son, my only one, like a common criminal, like a dog, he continued, crying out in his pain even more dully, they threw him into an unmarked grave, you must know who they were, I don’t know anything, nothing, they shot him or hanged him.
Without tearing himself away from Balter’s shining face, he jerked his head toward the other shore.
It’s true. Not where you worked but in the terrible prison on Kozma Street,* at least that’s what one supposes. This much I had to tell you.
He managed to unload this portion of his rage and then retrieve some of it with his explanation.
Balter had to take his eyes off the tormented man, though his professional curiosity was immediately aroused to know during which political wave the death sentence might have been issued. He had little doubt it had to do with 1956. To place the case correctly in the chronology, all he had to do was to look at the pastor and gauge the quality of his agitation with his sense organs. He could endure his own defeat only if he unilaterally relinquished their fellowship, which until a moment ago he had strongly expected the pastor would do. War criminals and relatives of Arrow Cross men behaved humbly; they could not afford such outbursts. And the debased and humiliated relatives of communists lacked anger and hatred, and they never gave up their rebellious, haughty conviction in the rectitude of their cause. Balter yanked his shirt and towel off his shoulder and slapped them down on the cracked silt; before the other man could try to stop him he undid his belt and shed his pants in a single vehement movement.
As if denying his decency, he stepped out of his pants and started for the thin stream at the center of the riverbed. As if with this majestic gesture he was telling the pastor that their audience had ended.
Before he could comprehend the other man’s nakedness, offered up as prey, the pastor quickly turned aside and without a word began to walk away. Not to see the other man’s genitals again; he did not wish himself so great a humiliation. And when he was certain he could see nothing of the man but his shadow in the light hovering on the water, he stopped and very loudly called back.
May God bless you, then.
Hearing his words echo from the other shore, from the episcopal see and from the heavy reddish brick walls of the prison, he knew his request for a blessing was in fact a curse.
By then Balter was in the water up to his knees, slapping some on his chest and shoulder before dipping his whole body in.
Driven once more by the zeal of correction, the pastor began.
May the Lord watch over you, guide your every step. That is what I shall ask him to do.
Again his voice came back to him as a threat; his apology to the other man was in vain, and in vain would he pray for the immense mercy of forgiveness.
There is no forgiveness.
The first ripe apricot fell off the tree in the middle of Balter’s garden just after midnight. It fell from somewhere near the top of the tree, hitting and grazing branches in its fall, and the first thud, which awakened Balter, was quickly followed by others.
Dávid slept peacefully that night, though he usually tossed, talked, and shouted in his sleep, or even walked around the dark rooms of the parsonage as if he were awake. His older sister and grandfather had to be on the lookout, though in the one-story house he could not harm himself
as he might in the apartment in Budapest, where he also sleepwalked.
But in the morning Balter did not find fallen apricots under the tree. He stared at the ground dumbfounded. Of course, in the shade of the wide-crowned tree and on this sandy rise grass grew very sparsely. He kept looking but did not find any fruit under the outermost branches either. He hadn’t bothered to separate the sounds and sights of his dreams from those of his wakefulness, or perhaps to look for some connection between them. He quickly deflected his thoughts from this issue; some animal must have taken them, he said to himself, he only dreamed of hearing them fall; and he went about his business.
But he knew of no animal that would take or eat ripe apricots.
At noon, when the horseflies arrived and he was cooling himself under the tree, as was his wont, another few ripe apricots fell to the ground.
As some sort of last warning.
He looked at their soft flesh against the sandy-gray ground, but did not touch them. Later, after the last ring of the midday bells, he stood up to put on his shirt. But he couldn’t find it on the sunny branch where he had hung it a short hour earlier. He was amazed. He looked at the empty branch for a long time, then went into the house but did not find the shirt there either.
As if the landscape, dizzy with the midday heat, denied every answer dictated by common sense.
Of course, eventually he’d have to assess what was happening to him here.
He sat on his only chair in the room and forgot about his lunch. If I can’t find it now, he excused himself, I’ll find it later. A weak breeze barely moved the air. The wind couldn’t have carried away my faded old shirt, the earth couldn’t have swallowed it. That was the sum of his assessment. Anxiety and fear, which at other times might have quickly weakened him, did not recur today. Today he was not confronted with an imaginary danger; for the first time destiny had sent palpable signs to him. Now he was sure that apricots had fallen from the tree during the night, no matter how often he tried to defend his memory by calling it a dream. Nor did he doubt that he had spread his wet shirt out on the same sun-beaten branch today as always. In response to these ominous signs, he entrusted himself to his own calm nature; he seemed to know exactly what to expect of those signs.
The pastor’s appearance the evening before was part of the world’s order being cleansed.
For the end of his life he was left by himself; he had nobody and no longer could have anybody. Everyone was at a different place in their lives. When he’d dipped his body into the water last evening every illusion and pain had ended. For him life had no individual condition beyond its historical conditions, and he couldn’t think about mystical or metaphysical conditions. All that sort of thing was the business of women or priests. He had served whom he served, retired, and remained as alone as he had been all his life. He and that pastor had nothing in common; anyway, he disliked priests no matter what kind. No one had anything to do with anyone. He was glad he didn’t even want a mistress for himself anymore.
Just as, at the beginning of his life, he’d thought he’d have something to do with every woman, with any woman at any time.
At most he’ll have to get used to ghosts from his previous life still coming back to tease him.
He continued to trust his steadfast strength. All his life he looked down on men who from birth did not have real physical strength. He didn’t know what to do with men like that.
Images replaced memories; apparitions warning of danger stepped out of the images. These belonged among the inexplicable things a man didn’t bother with. His dead mother held one end of a chain made of these signals; he sat at the other end, content with his mental peace, his big limbs relaxed. His conversation with the pastor had warned him that at the worst someone might appear around his house at any time to take revenge on him. The prowling tramp could be none other than his own son. Just as his mother had sent the young female with his lunch, the woman who would have gladly cooked and washed for him, but whom he hadn’t wanted.
His thoughts about these secret connections were suddenly validated in the air by the unexpected tolling of the church bell.
The fiendishly unexpected sound shook his body, and his muscles jerked, just like the previous evening when he’d noticed the pastor’s motionless shadow under the apricot tree.
It must be close to two o’clock by now.
He was ashamed of a reaction like that; he was no fragile little woman.
The small bell was ringing in the village. The tolling let everyone know that someone had departed from the world of the living.
Even as a child he hadn’t understood why churchmen did not ring the bell the moment they first learned of a death or when they saw it with their own eyes because they’d been at the deathbed.
But they always waited with the bell until the full hour.
Hearing the knell, he stood up; he laughed in joy.
Though he couldn’t have said what gave him joy or why he laughed.
He was no longer free, but he had nothing to do with anyone, not with the dead either. The life and death of unknown people meant nothing. For the sake of his fellow workers he’d always had to pretend a little that life and death meant something to him. He did not go out of his house; with his restless soul he assessed the landscape. He was agitated because he no longer had to do anything for anyone’s sake. Nothing stirred anywhere, but he could not let himself be taken in by illusions that others had created. After the last death knell, he heard no unusual sounds. With his sharp gaze, he looked up and down the footpaths and between the more distant flower beds and vegetable patches. He saw trodden clumps, pressed-down blades of grass, traces of careful footprints. They could have been old, or new, or even the stranger’s. He had two rakes; the one with the finer tines would serve his purpose better. I’ll have my lunch in the evening, he said to himself as if no longer bound by the body’s or time’s simpler needs. From the four stakes marking his boundaries, he would progress toward the house with the rake. If I don’t finish it today, I will tomorrow. He was taking no chances, not because he considered either the size or impossibility of the job, but because he was thinking of the footprints he would obliterate. Occasionally the rake was caught in a clump of grass or cut too deep with its tines. He carefully smoothed over the indentations that might help with the deception. He wanted to see his situation as clearly as possible, and he had no other method for it but this one.
He spent some time under the tree; ignoring the heat and horseflies, he carefully worked around the fallen apricots, which flies and ants had meanwhile chewed and nibbled at.
Still, in the bubble of thick silence, he was not completely satisfied. Something he could not name was bothering him. Until he realized that he had to mark the place where each apricot fell.
He drew circles around them.
By the time he finished raking the entire area, much sooner than he had hoped, it was a red twilight again. He reached back from the threshold to sweep away his last footprint. Not an inch of his land remained without the fine traces of the rake. Thick silence sat over the landscape. He wolfed down some bread, scallions, and dry salami, but he found no drinking water in any of the cans.
He decided not to go to the village for water. But listening to the booming in his ear of dangerously thickening blood, he was not alone in his thirsty vigil that night.
From the willows, he heard the tawny owl, whose sound is like someone dripping water on the surface of motionless water.
Occasionally a ripe apricot fell to the ground.
He could not keep an eye on everything from the door of his house or from the window of his small room. Because of the grapevines and the larger plum and morello trees, he could not see the lower-lying areas. Darkness made his ears the keepers of his attention.
A little later the moon’s pale-yellow waning crescent rose, but it only increased the chaotic picture before his eyes. He could not see into the depths of the long shadows. By midnight the air cooled off and mist
covered most things, though the starry sky remained clear and the moon glowed blue in it. He took a firefly for an approaching lamp.
Nothing else happened during that beautiful night.
He had had enough experience in keeping awake.
Some prisoners screamed in their sleep; a good guard could not relax his vigilance, because this was when their charges would go for the pitcher, which meant to be fucked in the ass, or possibly get killed.
On this thirsty night, he remembered for the first time the first night of his marriage.
But he did not keep his mind on it and failed to notice the direction in which his thoughts were straying. As if he had found the source of his life’s bitterness. He looked at what the two of them were doing to each other, but before he could become fully absorbed in his terrible shame, he had to think of his desirable sister-in-law, of course. When for the first time they were finally alone in the kitchen of the super’s apartment on the mezzanine floor on Teréz Boulevard. Because of the heavy downpour he did not have to worry about anyone.
At the very same time, Dávid was lying on his stomach under a light blanket, knees pulled up, and had just opened his eyes in his dark room. Through cracks in the closed shutters, cold light entered in loose stripes. He saw a high, plowed autumn field in the wrinkled rug. He was listening to the rhythmic airy music of crickets and to the tipcarts’ hollow creaking in the distant quarry.
The cavernous easy chair stood in the middle of the freshly plowed meadow.
Protruding from beneath the shadows of his clothes strewn on the chair, the arching armrest was like a raised fist of a hand bent at the wrist. He knew he was seeing the armrest, yet he seemed to feel the eyes of the invisible human figure sitting in the chair.
A shudder glided across the surface of his skin but he could not move.
A man’s resting arm was attached to the apparition’s fist, and a strong shoulder to the arm. Dávid raised his pelvis a little to ease the pressure on his bladder. He should go to the toilet. But in this condition he could not entrust the sight of his body to the eyes of the ghostly figure.